


You Understand

by telm_393



Category: New Girl
Genre: Angst, Best Friends, Depression, Gen, Introspection, Literal Sleeping Together, Post-Season/Series 04 Finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-14
Updated: 2016-02-14
Packaged: 2018-05-20 08:45:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5999503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telm_393/pseuds/telm_393
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nick sleeps with Schmidt (not like that, get your mind out of the gutter) and explains a few things to Cece, except Cece's not present.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Understand

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first New Girl fic, and it is somewhat angsty, and for that, I am sorry. You should see the other stuff I'm writing for this fandom. Anyway! Nick thinks too much and is a sad egg.

"Nick?" someone—Schmidt, of course Nick knows it's Schmidt—says in a small voice, and Nick sits up and blinks at him through bleary eyes, too used to being woken up like this to pretend he's still asleep, because Schmidt won't go away (there’s one of the first things Nick ever learned about Schmidt: he doesn’t go away) and Nick doesn't really want him to in the state he's probably in.

Schmidt's hair is a mess and he's looking at Nick through his eyelashes and fidgeting like he does when he's uncomfortable—when he's done something wrong, usually, or thinks he's doing something wrong—and his eyes look shiny in a way that makes Nick think there's at least a sixty percent chance of tears. Nick sighs and Schmidt looks down at the floor, playing with the strings on the sweatpants that are probably more expensive than Nick's entire wardrobe.

(“How can an ostensibly human man _not care_ about clothes?” Schmidt asks, frustrated enough that his voice has gone up like three octaves.

Nick looks down at his tomato soup stained blue hoodie and shrugs. “I actually think that might be more socially acceptable than caring as much as you do.”

“No one here is socially acceptable,” Winston says, throwing in his two cents as he pages through the issue of _Cosmo_ that accidentally came to their address with interest he’s not even bothering to contain.)

Nick knows what this is. This is a bad night. A really bad one, if Schmidt's doing this, and Nick barely has the energy to sigh again and ask, "What's up, Schmidty?"

Schmidt just ducks his head lower and starts toeing at the floor. He looks nervous and tired, around as tired as Nick always feels, with red rings under his eyes.

(To be fair, Nick hasn’t been as bad lately.

He knows this because while Coach was here, one time he looked at him in this searching way that made Nick uncomfortable until he broke and asked, _“What?”_

“You seem better, man.”

Nick gives him his best _you’re crazy, you’re all crazy except me_ look. “What?”

“You smile a lot more. Except it’s not creepy.”

“I have a creepy smile?”

“Uh, yeah, when you don’t mean it.” Coach helpfully mimics Nick’s _apparently_ creepy smile, all teeth and dead eyes.

“Ugh,” is Nick’s input.

He goes back to watching whatever’s on TV, and wishes he wasn't thinking it’s true that his lack of energy and the suffocating cotton-blanket-heaviness that covers/hides/shields him all the time hasn’t been as bad lately, and that yeah, smiling is easier, having fun is easier, and that’s even after breaking up with Jess, though he isn’t sure he’ll ever be as happy with a woman again as he was with her. But she stuck around, and sometimes he can guiltily pretend they didn’t break up at all, in those moments that he isn’t sure why they broke up.

Sometimes he thinks they were just chicken. He wonders if she was as scared about how much she loved him as he was about how much he loved her, and thinks probably not. Jess can find someone better than Nick. Nick will never find someone as amazing as Jess. He’s just not that lucky.

But.

He really is still happier, better, less prone to lying on the couch and slipping in and out of sleep all day, less likely to yell at people for reasons he can’t remember after he’s done, less teary, more likely to believe he’s actually any kind of asset to the world and not just an ugly lump, more human.

But he pretends he’s not, because that’s implying that there’s something wrong in the first place, something bad enough that it can get better.)

Nick still can't really get a read on what kind of bad night this is without some semblance of communication, though, not when he was just asleep and it’s ass o’ clock at some point in time, still dark out, so he asks again, "What's up, Schmidty?"

Schmidt shrugs, and Nick sighs again. "You're seriously not gonna give me anything?"

Schmidt mumbles something that probably isn't words, and looks around nervously. 

(Schmidt’s a high-strung kind of guy. He’s always been, but it got worse when he got skinny and everything became about control, control, control, especially after Schmidt started _getting noticed_ and some of those really bad things happened, things they don’t talk about, not in real conversations with real words that mean the same thing to everyone.

Nick’s really good at talking gibberish, though he’s not sure if it’s gibberish if there are some people who understand it, at least sometimes. Enough, even, to get some of his points across.)

"Do you want something, buddy?" Nick asks, manfully keeping his annoyance out of his voice, because he's tired and he doesn't have enough energy to worry right now. 

"I had a bad dream," Schmidt stage-whispers pathetically, eyes huge and sad. He sounds like a little kid. 

(Schmidt’s had trouble sleeping since Nick met him—nightmares that make him toss and turn and make little wounded sounds that make Nick feel icky, like he’s got a stomachache, night sweats that soak through the covers and paste his hair to his head and make him complain loudly in the morning, insomnia that leaves him lying on his covers sighing dramatically, making it so no one else around him can sleep either.)

Nick takes pity on him and helpfully adds the last part. "And you want to sleep with me."

Schmidt nods quickly. 

Nick sighs again, but Schmidt's not actually hard to sleep with if you don't mind the clinging, and, though this is something he will never admit, Nick doesn't. Nick lets his head roll back so he can communicate his put-uponness at the ceiling, and shifts over a little, patting at his bed. "Yeah, yeah."

Schmidt beams and scrambles into Nick's bed, curling up next to him and humming under his breath, a solid, reassuring weight.

(Look.

Look, Nick knows it’s weird, but he’s bad at knowing he can help upset people stop being upset and not just doing the thing, and in the end he genuinely doesn’t care.

When Schmidt was fat and they were living in a dorm, they’d sleep on the floor if they felt like “sharing a bed”, since they couldn’t actually comfortably fit into one of the bunk beds together. They covered themselves in a ridiculous amount of blankets, and it was…pretty nice. Schmidt was squishier then, obviously, and so Nick was actually more comfortable sleeping on the floor with him than he was sleeping in his actual bed, which smelled kind of like pot and the irresponsible amount of alcohol he’d spilled on it and was usually covered in crumbs.

And Schmidt would sleep with no problems, so Nick would feel helpful even though he wasn’t really doing anything, and Nick would at least be able to feel a little calmer than he usually did sober despite the clear and present danger of getting smothered under Schmidt, which was probably just a paranoia that he and Schmidt shared, because Nick was never even smothered once.

Nick’s the squishy one now.

He doesn’t mind.

When he was a little kid, he had a teddy bear named Humphrey, this ridiculously big, ridiculously old gray-but-he-wasn’t-always thing, and he slept with it every night.

But then one night when he got to bed, Humphrey wasn’t there.

His mom was having one of those weeks where she basically just slept and watched TV, and his dad was just…not there, so Nick covered his face with a pillow and cried until he fell asleep, entirely aware that anything and everything could abandon him, even an inanimate friend.

He never figured out where Humphrey went.

Someone probably threw him away.

He was really old.

Nick doesn’t know how his mind wandered to this place.

He’s never lived in the moment.)

Nick doesn't ask about Cece, why Schmidt doesn't just go to sleep with her, his actual fiancée, because he didn't remember her until Schmidt was here and now he kind of doesn't want to mention her, because Schmidt's warm and Nick might miss this, or at least the possibility of this—because it’s not like they’ve done this that often over the past few years—when Schmidt moves out.

Nick wonders if Cece’s noticed that Schmidt left their bed in the middle of the night. He wonders if she knows why.

 _Nothing personal,_ he tells her in his head.

 _He just does this sometimes when he's scared, and he's more used to me. He doesn't like change,_ Nick explains. _He never has. Neither do I. He's done this forever, as long as I'm sleeping alone. I think he thinks he's kind of doing me a favor, like I don't like sleeping alone either. That's not true, by the way. I don't care one way or another. But it's a way he excuses things, so I let him think that, if he's actually thinking it. Not like I know. I’m not a mindreader._

_Though I gotta say I know him pretty well, mindreader or not, but, y'know. So do you._

_Should I feel smug that he went to me when he was scared, and not you? Probably not._

_But I think you’d get it, why I do feel that way. I know he tells you things he'd never tell me, and I know you feel smug about it, don't think I don't know, and I'm fine with that. I probably don't wanna know. I already know a bunch of things about him that I don't wanna know._

_We've been through a lot together. You know, like you and Jess. You'll always know her better, she'll always know you better._

_In some ways._

_Like you said._

_Best friends, right?_

_You understand._

Schmidt, who must've fallen asleep at some point, rolls over and latches onto Nick, throwing an arm over Nick's chest and burying his face against his shoulder, murmuring something unintelligible. 

Nick stares up at the ceiling and counts the days until the wedding, and then the days until Schmidt moves out of the loft, and then sheep. 

He's so tired, but it takes him forever to fall asleep.

Nick hates change.

It's a thing with him.


End file.
